Posted
by
Zonkon Friday November 11, 2005 @05:31PM
from the more-in-the-vein-of-sony dept.

SenseOfHumor writes "A U.S. Court has shut down three companies for secretly bundling spyware. The assets of Enternet Media Inc. and Conspy & Co. Inc., based in California, and Iwebtunes, based in Ohio, have been frozen pending further court action, the FTC said. The court also ordered all three firms to halt downloads of the software." From the article: "According to a complaint filed in district court in Los Angeles, Enternet and Conspy bundled their malicious software with music files, song lyrics and cellular telephone ring tones offered free on a range of Web sites. The software was also disguised as a security upgrade for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer Web browser."

No, I didn't miss it. I think by doing that Sony BMG just acknowledged that the claims were true. And they will continue the same business practices as soon as the dust has settled if they're not slapped, hard. Despite distancing themselves from Sony BMG, EMI is still pushing forward with their "2nd generation copy protection" as well. Just keep those lawsuits coming...

And they will continue the same business practices as soon as the dust has settled if they're not slapped, hard.

Getting told off by the President of the United States isn't getting slapped down? No offense, but when the most powerful political figure in the world speaks (save your HHGttG jokes, we've heard them), you had better listen or face the consequences later.

Just because they got slapped down in a fairly "nice" way, doesn't mean that they aren't going to be smarting for a very long time to come.

The way I read the story [washingtonpost.com], W didn't say anything. It was Stewart Baker, his newly appointed "Assistant Secretary of Nobody knows who I am or what my job is; not that it matters because I'm probably just as qualified as Michael Brown so I won't really be doing much anyway."

I seem to have gone off on a tangent. Anyway. It wasn't the President who "told them off" in a fairly nice way.

Hate to break this to you bubba but Sony was not "slapped down" by PotUS. They were admonished by Stewart Baker from the Department of Homeland Security http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/1 1/the_bush_admini.html [washingtonpost.com] , huge difference. But more to the point no that isn't being "slapped down" as the Department of Homeland Security has little to no ability to directly impact what Sony is doing. As an aside even if it had been shrub it would have been less effective given the fact that his influen

Answer: never. The main difference between Sony BMG and these three companies is that these three companies are/were very small. Once you get enough captital to bribe members of the government with, you basically become untouchable.

I guess this episode should become a lesson in all MBA classes. If your company is small then keep your head low and do good business. Once the company becomes big enough, _then_ you get to do the nasty things.

I'm no fan of Sony's actions, but there's another big difference here: Sony at least has the excuse of attempting to do something that is legal, i.e., protect its intellectual property. That doesn't make Sony's rootkit acceptable, but it can at least claim a pure motive. Not so when you're telling grandma that she's getting a security fix just to give her spyware instead.

with the exception of BMG label Arista's Brian Wilson Christmas Album, that doesn't appear to have the rootkit, and I will buy appropriate copies for gifting. Sony bought BMG a few months ago.

I hope your post was intended to be funny.

Sony has at various points claimed that there was no rootkit, that it could be uninstalled and that there was no spyware and that Apples are not affected. They have also stated that there is anti-copying technology on all of their CDs. You can safely assume that all Sony/BMG

nothing that seems to have invaded either the mac or the win-me machine at this juncture, so the older BMG stuff appears to be in play on this disc. mac shows no files other than music files on the disc. there are no EULA pop-ups, and no calls home. I checked on a hard disk I don't care about.the local scene is vibrant around the twin cities, but I haven't been lately, so I'm a little out of touch on it. the Cities Sampler should be out, so I can check that, of course. but my list runs from ages 20s to

If I had my way, Sony would be held accountable in a similiar manner. While these companies installed spyware, Sony actually installed a backdoor. Sony's actions are a violation of a far greater magnitude.

Sony's product was a back door? Like I can connect to a PC that listened to a Sony CD and remotely control it? I was not aware that was the case. AFAIK, the tactics Sony used are actually less intrusive than some of the spyware I have tried to remove. What some spyware companies are doing is flat out hacking (intentional spelling).

Yes, apparently it is a back door. Also it is harder to remove than pretty much any spyware I've heard of. Check the uninstall procedures that have been posted so far for this. It acts as a safe mode driver.

Is this the same Enternet company who wrote the simple Enternet 300 DSL connection program for routerless users? I remember my ISP would bundle that program with the DSL modems you got for free when you signed up for broadband (are they called DSL "modems" or something else? lol). I wonder how far back their affiliation in spyware goes... I might have to dig up my old computer and take a look-see:/

Is it just me or is transceiver a silly name? Literally, "A transmitter and receiver housed together in a single unit and having some circuits in common, often for portable or mobile use." Like, whoop-de-doo. ADSL is still an analog signal, right? So why isn't it called a modem? Er, well, why isn't it technically called a modem? Its function is so similar to that of an ordinary modem that it's stunning; it's connected to a computer on a digital interface, and sends an analog signal over the same pair your P

Is the technology in a DSL modem really the same as the Discrete Multitone (DMT) in a 56K? Since it a) doesn't make a phone call, and b) sounds much different from my old dialup, I always assumed two different technolgies.

No matter--the transceivers for cable internet connections are called "modems," too. I think the two are called "modems" for the same reason WinXP PPPoE connections are called "dialers"--they are easy approximations.

Now, let's go ahead and shut down GAIN and all these 'websearch' places, and we'll be doing something. I see the auto-installing IE websearch bars and the "internet optimizer" wares to be some of the most vicious of all spyware. It's beyond intrusive, and downright annoying. Who wants to continually "uninstall" all of these?

So don't use IE for casual surfing. Use it only for those sites that you absolutely must have for business or whatever, and which absolutely require it. Even *then* you may be at risk, due to attacks on third party ad servers, etc. Remember the Bofra exploits caused by system compromises of Falk AG's ad servers?

IE still has unpatched exploits against it. I almost always does. This is the normal state of affairs.

The hidden windows shares are still advertised by the server, but the windows client ignores them. Try looking at the shares with samba or looking at the network traffic with a sniffer and you'll see the real share list. Gee, does that qualify as a rookit if they're really there but windows is instructed to no show it?

Funny thing is that Windows already hides certain file names anyway. Sony or a virus writer could have simply used one of those.

Don't forget to add Aurora, Claria, ISearch, and WhenU to this list. These are companies whose "product" I remove daily. As a tech in a white box store I now spend over 80% of my time removing this crap. It would be nice to go back to fixing hardware problems and building new boxes.

They realized that due to their sorely lax security concerning MUSIC CDs, anyone on a windows machine (like the gov't is going to use terminals? Please, we're talking about BIG WAR SPENDING here) within the Gov't can insert a "DRM-disabled" CD from Sony and compromise national security. That's why they slapped Sony's ass like a cheap $20 whore.

Sadly, these guys will just probably just re-incorporate and continue this nasty business. Reincorporation is simple and can be done quickly. They may even do it internationally to make legal efforts against them costly and time consuming. By the time they are shut down again, they will have run with the money. Sad but quite likely.

And if so, why the hell isn't the Corporate Death Penalty being applied against some of the nation's biggest offenders? There are any number of corporations that have caused hellish environmental destruction, have screwed bajillions of dollars out of consumers, have outright lied about their products, have been caught red-handed cheating the government out of billions, etcetera. As far as I know, most of those companies are allowed to continue to exist... yet surely they are more harmful to society than t

No doubt the majority of/.ers would like to see the CEOs of these companies fined and jailed, but the responsibilty in other matters such as accounting fraud can go down the ladder.

This is not a troll, at least not intentionally, but at what point does malicious programming become a civil or criminial offense for those who know most intimately what the software does and the issues it involves? Intention is a significant part of legal matters, and while I am entirely against "programming malpractice" law